If old homes could talk ...

Published 1:00 am, Monday, November 29, 2004

"That's your history," said Thermes, who lives in Newtown. "When it's gone, it's gone."
Sitting in her dining room, the freelance illustrator, graphic designer and writer marveled at her own home's history.
"It was here before the Revolutionary War," she said. The
Great Hill Road house
was built in 1720.
There's a lot an old home can teach somebody, she said, if they let it.
That's a lesson Thermes has tried to teach children nationwide.
The 38-year-old illustrated and wrote the children's book "When I Was Built," published in 2001.
Inspired by her red, colonial home, Thermes creates two families living in different times in the same home.
In the book, published by Henry Holt and Co., the house explains how the Grays, a modern family, live differently than the Fairchilds, a family from centuries past.
"Today, I hear telephones jangle wildly. The Grays' fax machine hums and their computers bleeps with urgent information from minute to minute," the story reads.
"When I was built, the Fairchilds sent their news in letters, delivered by a man on horseback. It could take weeks for messages to reach faraway friends."
With the house and setting looking just like Thermes' home, fiction closely follows fact.
"Watch yourself, people fly down this road," Thermes warned a visitor.
In her book, the house talks about the road too.
"Today, I see cars and trucks race past my front door on slick black pavement. When I was built, the road was just a rutted dirt path. I followed the slow, clip-clop rhythm of a passing horse and wagon, and the quiet footsteps of a walking neighbor."
The house was also home to at least one writer in the past: Newtown poet
Louis Untermeyer
used to live there.
Thermes dedicated her book to her children, Jeremy, now 11, and Emily, now 8, and "all future children who live in this home - an old house is a wise teacher."
Thermes said her house has indeed been a teacher since she and her husband, Stephen, bought it seven years ago. While renovating, they have found historical nuggets like a 19th century boot and old silverware.
The mysteries of the house helped inspire Thermes to start writing her book shortly after moving in. Seven years later, the house still teaches.
"It teaches you patience and life isn't perfect," Thermes said, laughing at the seemingly endless renovations and repairs. "There is always something that breaks." Thermes is writing another children's book due out in 2006 about family tradition.
But her first venture will always remain close to her heart, she said.
''You just send it out into the world and hope people love it," she said.
Thermes has a fan in 11-year-old
Sarah Craig
, a third grader at
Hawley Elementary School
in Newtown. Craig bought the book at the school's book fair last week.
"You see through time how things change," Craig said at the book fair, the day after reading her new purchase. "It was like the best book I've ever read. I want to read it a thousand more times."